How do I limit the times Customers can book at the beginning of the day?
Updated 7/15/2022
Imagine this: You are walking into work at 7:52 am. You get to your desk and check your email to discover that, at 8 am, you have an Appointment with a Customer! This Appointment wasn’t on your calendar before you left the night before and you now have to scramble to prep for the Appointment in 8 minutes!
Ever experience this? If you have, you may want to read through the rest of this article on how to protect the initial opening hour(s) for your Staff Members and their schedules.
Protecting the Next Available Business Day
Since the Customer View application is usually available 24/7, your Customers may be scheduling an Appointment at night or during the weekend. In this case, when your business is closed, you may want to make sure that the system can hide some time at the next day's Open Hour from Customers. This can now be done by modifying an Appointments setting in your account.
Please note, that if the next available business day is actually not the next calendar day, the amount of time set in this setting will affect that next day. For example, if today is Friday and the business is closed on Saturday and Sunday, the next available day for Appointments would be Monday. If the setting is configured with 2 hours, then a Customer would not be able to book an Appointment within the first 2 hours of Monday.
Updating the DaySmart Appointments Calendar Settings
To set up this new scheduling method, a Headquarters Administrator will need to determine an amount of time for this option on the Settings > Appointments page. Once on this page, locate the option for the “Limit Customers from making Appointments for this amount of time after the Location’s start time on their next available day” setting.
You can choose any amount of time, a combination of hours and minutes, that the system will use to buffer the display of available times to Customers on the Customer View. Once you have entered the information, be sure to Update the settings.
Calendar Protection in Action
Not sure how this protection can help you and your business? Read what Ken White, Senior Manager of Transportation Systems at Staples, Inc., had to say:
We were having an issue with carriers scheduling next day appointments after the receiving team had left for the day. This was a problem because they didn’t have the proper labor planned for that shipment that was booked after they left for the day. The Appointments Plus team provided a solution using preference #44 and explained the math behind the solution. This was extremely helpful to the receiving warehouse to control their labor.
Software is flexible and easy to use. Many carriers are already using it so transition was easy. We use API’s to do validations and populate backend systems. We have a much more enhanced appointment system using this software as the base."
-- Ken White |